Highland Clearances – 1

When is it excusable to dispossess and forcibly change the social structure, economy, language and culture of a people? Apparently when the victims are Gaels, but not when they are Africans, Native Americans, or virtually any other group, accordingly to mainstream historians. When it happens to other people it is “injustice,” “oppression,” or “genocide,” but when it happens to Gaels it is merely the inevitable calculus of economics – or so some historians would have us believe. How did Gaels interprets their experience at the time?

I recently acquired a copy of the newly released book Bearing the People Away: The Portable Highland Clearances Companion by June Skinner Sawyers (Cape Breton University Press, 2013), which raises these and other questions. It is an excellent compendium of all sorts of information about the Clearances when they happened, as well as about how they have been interpreted and memorialized in the generations since that time.

One of the major reasons why the Clearances evoke such divisive and explosive debates in Scotland is that the inequities and onflicts that allowed these brutal acts to happen – conflicts of cultural authority, of political power, and of legal recognition of land rights – have yet to be resolved. (If you have any doubt about that, read the on-going work by Andy Wightman and Alastair McIntosh, for example.) As Sawyers’ fine volume demonstrates, the Clearances have remained powerful symbols of injustice in the Gaelic psyche and have been continually evoked in songs, stories, articles and books.

Understanding the Clearances as the cultural tragedy it was for the Gaels requires acknowledging the following facts about these events (given in more detail in Newton 2009):

The context of cultural conquest. The Clearances were one of a series of oppressive measures imposed on the Gaels in the larger context of cultural conquest. The anglophone world (including the Lowlands) already harboured fantasies of exterminating the Gaels by the time of Culloden, and this sense of threat and alienation did not abate easily. The anglophone world felt it their right and perogative to impose its values, culture and policies on the Gaels “for their own good,” and these impositions have contributed significantly to deculturation.

Racism. Gaels were seen as being a distinct and inferior race to that of the Anglo-Saxon (and Lowlanders very consciously sided themselves with the English on racial equations). Social or agricultural problems were commonly attributed by anglophones to Gaels’ supposed racial inferiority.

4th-world nationhood. Gaels had no political self-determination that allowed them to mitigate hostile external forces or address issues internally. Whenever a people is governed by another group who are antithetical to their identity, culture and language, the results are likely to be inimical to their survival. The subject state of Gaels within the British polity – which actively demanded conformity to English norms – left them vulnerable to the factors listed previously, and Highland areas still suffer from the democratic deficit.

In some modern histories, difficulties with climate, agriculture, and social structures are pointed to as causing underlying insecurity or instability in Highland life, making large-scale changes inevitable, especially when populations grew in response to improved medicine. However, there are many societies that experience these difficulties but that does not mean that they are begging for foreign peoples to take them over and impose “improvements” on them “for their own good” (which was exactly the rationale of colonization in the Age of Empires).

Do chronic problems with famine in Somalia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Iceland mean that these societies need to be taken over by “more developed” countries and have their languages and cultures “fixed”? Or should they have the right and opportunity to address their own problems on their own terms according to their own agendas? The colonial overtones of many conventional interpretations of the Highland Clearances ought to be obvious.

Despite having examined many Gaelic texts remarking on this period, I have yet to find a single text that complains about inherent difficulties with Highland climate, agriculture, or social structures that made life untenable, or a single person who said, “Thanks! We really needed your help to solve our problems. We’re glad to be rid of our inferior language, culture and land.”

A crucial article of which few people seem aware (it was pointed out to me by my friend Domhnall Uilleam Stiubhart) explains clearly the instrumental role of legal corporations in the Lowlands to impose change on Highland society, profit from it, and rationalize those changes with the language of modernity:

One of the themes which emerges from studies of the history of accounting and indigenous peoples is the conflict which results when accounting, with its association with capitalist values and the primacy of economic imperatives, is imposed on traditional cultures. Edinburgh accountants ventured to the Highlands and Islands imbued with a set of economic, social and moral values which clashed with those of the local population. In common with 19th century projects for the oppression of indigenous peoples it is likely that accountants were insulated from feelings of remorse by adhering to prevailing assumptions about the inferiority of Highlanders and Gaelic civilisation, and the superiority of their own ideologies. This was most clearly revealed in those instances where detailed evidence is available about accountants’ decision-making. […]

Accountants were therefore, not simply applying their craft in a neutral, value free manner. While their decision-making was founded on the cold logic of maximising estate revenue and rendering property more saleable, it was also conditioned by prevailing ideologies about the progress of the capitalist economy, ‘improvement’ and social morality. In exercising their professional judgement in ways which dispos- sessed the impoverished crofters and cottars of the Highlands and Islands, senior Edinburgh accountants advanced the commercialisation of the landed estate and entrenched landlordism. Accountants were effectively agents in the acculturation of Scottish Gaels. Their activities were in accord with the contemporary “Establishment” who “treated the Highlands like colonies to be exploited”. Edinburgh accountants extracted their reward for the performance of this role in the accumulation of economic and social capital which underpinned their claims to professional status. Their role as trustees cemented an association with the landed-legal milieu at a time when professional organisation was being contemplated. (Walker 2003: 844, 846)

Here we have a very insightful study that clearly links the dark, repressive side of modernity (as asserted by Western European empires) with the “development” of the Highlands, and which unmasks the colonial assumptions embedded in many accounts about Highland society.

If it is no longer acceptable to rationalize the dispossession and displacement of other native peoples on account of their supposed inferiority (“The natives of X can’t exploit the land properly and it is our Manifest Destiny as the superior race to supplant them”), why is this same underlying conceit so seldom questioned about the Gaels? What effect has the hegemonic conditioning of British education had on delaying questions of this sort?

I plan on writing another two or three blog entries to show some of the texts produced by Gaels before 1800 that demonstrates that they understood the Clearances to be the acts of cultural invasion and suppression that they were.

Selected Bibliography

Michael Newton. Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2009.

10 Comments

You compound the attack on the Scottish Highlander, by separating them from our iconography, the kilt, the bagpipes , whisky , song and dance. Then you attack our language ….do not entertain the colonist view .

I am having a hard time understanding your response. I think that you may have misread my blog post. In terms of iconography, you should read my previous post “Cultural Appropriation” which discusses “iconography” in detail (although that term implies empty and dead symbols, which is not the appropriate way of looking at Gaelic culture).

In terms of language — what are you talking about? If you can be specific, I can reply. Cha d’rinn mi siud idir idir.

I cannot see where the writer of this piece attacks ‘our’ language; in fact, emphatically, he does not. A close reading of the closing sentence of an article that raises questions rather than claims to answer them, shows that Michael Newton intends to access Gaelic sources to develop upon some of the questions/points initially raised here. Few historians of Gaelic history have been willing to do so, and I would recommend a book entitled ‘We’re Indians Sure Enough’ as one of precious few texts where the voice of the Gaels is given place and due respect in the telling of their history.

It will come as a great comfort to first nation Americans and Australians, to name but a few, that their extermination was unacceptable. Do you want to break this good news to them or shall I? I like the way you lump in the lowlanders with all the others who persecuted the Gaels as an inferior race. I think you’ll find that Gaels were pretty well represented in the ranks of those exterminating races whose land they coveted in the British Empire As a Scot myself (I’m terribly sorry, a lowlander, untermensch, stranger) I’ve never met any Scot who though himself superior to a Gael, but in my seven years in the Islands I met plenty of Gaels who seemed to consider themselves superior to me, although they would be far too polite to say it out loud. It is one thing to be persecuted, it is another to become a persecuted race by definition. It’s tantamount to being a professional bore. Site yours examples forensically of injustices which have not been addressed. You seem to be swinging your punches rather wide. The Palestinians you ain’t.

Your text sounds pretty edgy. Perhaps your reception in the Islands indicates the kinds of ethnic tensions with a long history that I’ve indicated in this short blog entry.

As far as professional bores who define themselves by persecution — well, that’s your issue. The effects of empire have permeated all corners of the world (at least where there were things to be exploited), and people have a legitimate right to tell their stories and determine their own paths out of it — whether or not it bores you.

As for profiting from empire, lots of people did, as long as they were willing to work for the system — Africans, Native Americans, Chinese, Hindus — lots of examples of that. I think the issue is not the “racial identity” of the group that is of the essence here, it’s how they fit into a system of domination and exploitation, and that’s a matter I plan on addressing at least in passing in a later blog entry.

More of a general note here.
I really appreciate these blog postings. The first academic works I was exposed to in my university Anthropology classes relating to Gaels (Scottish) was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition. At the time I remember thinking that something didn’t add up; that in all its railing against falseness the essay itself was in many ways a false ,or at the very least incomplete, representation. Thanks for helping to fill in the gaps for me and providing some great resources for further reading.
I had a similar sense of incompleteness reading Eric Richards’ works on The Clearances.